Public access to federally funded research: SPARC comments

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), along with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries that promotes expanded sharing of scholarship in the networked digital environment. SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of outputs of the research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments.

SPARC was formed to act on the library community’s desire to ensure that the promise of the Internet to dramatically improve scholarly communication, particularly in the journals marketplace, was realized. It has been an innovative leader in the rapidly expanding international movement to make scholarly communication more responsive to the needs of researchers, students, the academic enterprise, funders, and the public. Its pragmatic agenda focuses on collaborating with other stakeholders to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication norms, practices, and policies that leverage the networked digital environment to support research and expand the dissemination of research findings.

SPARC thanks the Office of Science and Technology Policy for convening a robust, open discussion on the importance of ensuring broad public access to the results of federally funded research. We share the Administration’s view that enhancing access to this information will promote advances in science and technology, encourage innovation and discovery, and enhance the diffusion of knowledge throughout our society. We fully support the expansion of the current National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy to all other federal agencies that conduct scientific research, in order to create a freely accessible, permanent digital archive of the results of our nation’s investment in scientific research.